"... but now they see all these pictures online of us smiling and looking happy and fashionable and realize it’s not a sign of oppression," says Zulfiye Tufa, 24, who Instagrams a hijab selfie every day.

"Modesty is the opposite of what Instagram is about, so it can certainly be controversial," said Melanie Elturk, 29, founder of a Chicago company that markets head scarves and modest clothing. We're told she "tries to limit the number of selfies she posts to keep her ego in check."

Quoted in "A Makeover for the Hijab, via Instagram/Muslim Women Add Personal Style to a Traditional Garment," where I learned a new word: mipsters (i.e., Muslim hipsters). But somebody tell Urban Dictionary, which seems to think it's either a hipster in the Mission District of San Francisco ("Says things like 'Clean is the new dirty,' with no sense of humor") or a Mainstream Hipster ("They are hipster because it's the mainstream. They listen to primarily chart music, but some of this is a little indie/alternative because it's in the charts (eg Ed Sheeran)"). I wonder if there are multiple -ipster words for all the letters of the alphabet.

"... until Friday night a Texas grand jury announced an indictment of governor Rick Perry. The “crime” for which Perry faces a sentence of 5 to 99 years in prison is vetoing funding for a state agency. The conventions of reporting — which treat the fact of an indictment as the primary news, and its merit as a secondary analytic question — make it difficult for people reading the news to grasp just how farfetched this indictment is."

"I said, ‘I won’t let that happen.’ So it was my job to keep Robin from being funny. We had a shorthand signal for when he got a little flamboyant, improvising," said Penny Marshall, the director of "Awakenings."

She curled her fingers tight and dropped the fist to her groin: “It meant ‘More balls.’ ”

"Politics, though, isn't the most important issue on the mind of Ms. Sun, a 34-year-old Beijing resident who's bailing out.... Her 6-year-old daughter is asthmatic, and Beijing's chronic pollution irritates the girl's lungs. 'Breathing freely is a basic requirement,' she says. The girl also has a talent for music, art and storytelling that Ms. Sun fears China's test-driven schools won't nurture."

Further down on the page, you can see Drudge has a "frowns" theme going:

Perry in synch with Merkel and Putin.

ADDED: Notice that in the still shot, Rosemary is making a gun-shooting gesture and the "GOTCHA!" headline implies that she's hit her target. Rosemary's last name is Lehmberg, but you won't find it on Drudge's page. She hit the big time as a first-name only person: Rosemary. "Rosemary's Revenge" sounds like the name of a sequel to the movie "Rosemary's Baby."

"He was so pudgy and was slowing down, so that’s why I caught up to him," [the victim, Clara] Vondrich said, adding she felt sorry for the kid.

The teen was wearing sneakers and Vondrich, 36, had on wedgie sandals that didn't even have a strap around the heel to hold them on. And we're told she held onto the kid for 2 minutes until the police arrived. This happened in Brooklyn, and of course, there are photographs of the scene, published in the NY Post, which withholds the name of the alleged thief but not the photographs of his face and the body-shaming statements about him.

Here's the article, which is subtitled "For-profit law schools are a capitalist dream of privatized profits and socialized losses. But for their debt-saddled, no-job-prospect graduates, they can be a nightmare." That's a story we've seen many times, from Campos and others, and it's a common journalistic practice to begin with an attention-getting anecdote that's supposed to set up the sober, evidence-based analysis to follow, even though it's often not all that connected. But this anecdote is just so weird, and it's lacking in the details I would need to make sense of it even aside from whether it has much to do with the "law-school scam" topic.

Last April, David Frakt, a candidate for the deanship at the Florida Coastal School of Law was giving his job talk, we're told, discussing "what he saw as the major problems facing the school: sharply declining enrollment, drastically reduced admissions standards, and low morale among employees."

But midway through Frakt’s statistics-filled PowerPoint presentation, he was interrupted when Dennis Stone, the school’s president, entered the room. (Stone had been alerted to Frakt’s comments by e-mails and texts from faculty members in the room.) Stone told Frakt to stop “insulting” the faculty, and asked him to leave. Startled, Frakt requested that anyone in the room who felt insulted raise his or her hand. When no one did, he attempted to resume his presentation. But Stone told him that if he didn’t leave the premises immediately, security would be called. Frakt packed up his belongings and left.

First, we're seeing the way social media can work within an institution. A speaker may be in a room, experiencing dominance and control over the group by standing and lecturing while they silently and seemingly politely listen, and yet a whole revolution could be going on in text. Objections to phrasings can be texted and twittered about. No one includes the speaker, who rambles along according to his plan. The audience — instead of interacting in the normal manner of human intercourse through the ages — summons an authority from outside the room, and this clownish character rescues the passive-aggressive audience from their oppression.

(If the lawprofs are modeling this insidious new form of classroom participation, they will get their comeuppance when students use it on them. The professor attempts to conduct a discussion, perhaps of some touchy issue like affirmative action or abortion, and the students look disengaged, but they are really having an intense discussion, hurling accusations around. The professor is a racist. The professor is a sexist. Next thing you know, the dean has been summoned, breaks into the classroom, and conducts and on-the-spot trial. Whoa! Get ready, lawprofs.)

Second, what did the faculty find so insulting that they demanded an intervention from an outsider? What would have been enough to propel Stone into the room to interrupt a candidate — mid-presentation — and kick him out? To threaten to call security?! It doesn't make sense to portray this — as Campos does — as distress over the same old "law-school scam," which is about the ratio of jobs to students and the high tuition, and so forth. Even if Frakt presented the statistics vividly and the economic situation at the Florida Coastal School of Law is dismal and disturbing, it would not justify the weird drama. The normal response would be to push the candidate with questions or to look at him blankly and, after the time for the talk was over or close enough to over, drift out of the room having decided to vote against him. It must be something more, and I'm irked at Campos for sticking this anecdote at the top as if it will make readers see the dreadful emergency that is the "law-school scam."

Can somebody email me about what really happened that day? Without more, I would hypothesize that Frakt said some things about race and/or gender that got texted into what felt like a realization that racial/sexual harassment is going on right now. I would guess that Stone got a message that the school itself was condoning some kind of harassment and that he had an immediate duty to end it. Am I right?

Somebody talk to me.

UPDATE: David Frakt has a long blog post at The Faculty Lounge detailing what he said that day he was so rudely interrupted. Does it answer my question? He doesn't know what the faculty were texting and emailing or what Stone was thinking. What could have been perceived as "insulting"? In his account: "I explained that, according to my interpretation of LSAT scores... over half of the students in the 2013 entering class at FCSL
[fell] in the 'extreme risk' of failure category." I don't know the precise words or tone of voice he used, but conceivably, the statistics are so horrible that it felt intolerably insulting just to hear the facts stated. Frakt said he "suggested that it was unfair, ethically questionable, and a potential violation of ABA standards to admit students with such poor aptitude for the study of law," and he predicted that the ABA might put the school on probation, which would drive students away and exacerbate the problem. That's pretty frightening, but it's still not enough to justify cutting off his talk. It may nevertheless make Stone's unwise reaction comprehensible.

The Travis County district attorney’s office has long been a cesspool of corruption. It was that office, controlled by the Democratic Party machine, that infamously indicted Tom DeLay for nothing. It took years before DeLay could finally clear his name, and his career was ruined.

Quote from a character in a novel about race-reassignment treatments, reviewed in the NYT here.

One day Kelly meets a familiar-looking black man. This turns out to be his old friend and bandmate Martin Lipkin, a Jewish guy who has undergone what he calls “racial reassignment surgery.” Inside, Martin always felt black.

Alternatives to reading that novel:

1. Read "Black Like Me," the bestseller that seared America's conscience in the early 1960s.

"In an exceedingly brief period, coyote, wolf and dog genes have been remixed into something new: a predator adapted to a landscape teeming with both prey and another apex predator, us. And this mongrel continues to evolve."

"Today, unfortunately, the atmosphere is that if you go to anybody for work, that person will immediately ask, ‘What is in this for me?’ When he learns that there is nothing for him, he will say, ‘Why should I?’ We have to break out of this cycle of ‘what is in this for me’ and ‘why should I.’ We need to shine our national character."

Lands' End was just trying to "reward our valued customers with magazine subscriptions highlighting fashion and lifestyle topics," but the parents who were buying school uniforms were shocked at the magazine that was selected for them: GQ.

Belief in the power of Obama's speaking has faded. And yet... there's still a belief that he could solve problems through great speech. The word "dispassionate" reveals that remaining hope. As if injecting passion might work.

Obama’s caution on what happened in Ferguson is not surprising. It’s not just a racial issue, but one of policing and local control. Early in this tenure, Obama, at a press conference, had said Massachusetts police “acted stupidly” in arresting Harvard professor and Obama friend Henry Louis Gates, Jr. in front of his home. The police action was probably unwise, but the president was criticized for weighing into a local law enforcement matter.

"Rescuers came across numerous bears before eventually finding the child. The tot was extremely thin, with mosquito bites covering most of her body, as well as scratches on her feet. Larina remembered everything about her frightening ordeal, especially how Kyrachaan had kept her safe and watched over her...."

"She was met with roars of approval, which one Detroit critic said he presumed had come from 'the arsonists, looters and snipers in the audience.' Another critic, however, wrote that her show let white people know what they had to learn, and learn fast. Was she the voice of national tragedy or of the next American revolution?"

1859 J. R. Bartlett Dict. Americanisms (ed. 2), Bust, a burst, failure. The following conundrum went the rounds of the papers at the time the Whig party failed to elect Mr. Clay to the presidency: ‘Why is the Whig party like a sculptor? Because it takes Clay, and makes a bust.’

As that old riddle shows, a "bust" is also a sculpture of the upper part of the body, and it's this meaning which leads to "bust" meaning "woman's bosom or breasts."

1858
T. De Quincey Secret Societies (rev. ed.) in Select. Grave & Gay
VII. 250 Oh, that dreadful woman, with that dreadful bust!—the big
woman, and the big bust!—whom and which to encircle in ‘a chaste salute’
would require a man with arms fourteen feet long!

The sculpture/bosom meaning has a different etymology from the drinking/collapse meaning, which began as a variation of the word "burst."

Publicity surrounding a suicide has been repeatedly and definitively linked to a subsequent increase in suicide, especially among young people. Analysis suggests that at least 5 percent of youth suicides are influenced by contagion....

There’s a particularly strong effect from celebrity suicides....The idea is to avoid emphasizing or glamorizing suicide, or to make it seem like a simple or inevitable solution for people who are at risk.

I've noticed, in the coverage of the Robin Williams suicide, a grasping onto the belief that he felt compelled: He couldn't help it. That's comforting for survivors, and with some celebrities, everyone feels like a survivor, but it unwittingly sends the message to those who feel drawn to suicide that it's hopeless and that if you succumb, you won't be blamed; in fact, you will have made a profound statement of the magnitude of your pain, and it will fill the survivors with love and understanding (as opposed to the new load of problems and questions that you've created and escaped).

I don't really think it takes away his dignity to read this considering that it's addressed to most of you. He's such an asshole. I want you all to say 'asshole' really loud.... God! You asshole.... And I'm laying in our bed, and I'm really sorry. And I feel the same way you do. I'm really sorry you guys. I don't know what I could have done. I wish I'd been here. I wish I hadn't listened to other people, but I did. Every night I've been sleeping with his mother, and I wake up in the morning and think it's him because his body's sort of the same. And I have to go now. Just tell him he's a fucker, OK? Just say "fucker." "You're a fucker." And that you love him.

“He filmed everything around him,” said Geralyn Huxley, a curator of film and video at the Warhol Museum. “He went to people’s houses and filmed the dinners. He was basically a workaholic and the amount of film is unbelievable.”

But she added: “For all of the film out there, there’s very little of Warhol himself in any of it, actually. You get the sense that he didn’t really like to see himself on camera.”

August 13, 2014

"The chaotic clarity that lashed like an electric cable, that razzed and sparked with amoral, puckish wonder was in fact harvested madness. A refinement of an energy that could turn as easily to destruction as creativity.... Robin Williams could have tapped anyone in the western world on the shoulder and told them he felt down and they would have told him not to worry, that he was great, that they loved him. He must have known that. He must have known his wife and kids loved him, that his mates all thought he was great, that millions of strangers the world over held him in their hearts, a hilarious stranger that we could rely on to anarchically interrupt, the all-encompassing sadness of the world. Today Robin Williams is part of the sad narrative that we used to turn to him to disrupt. What platitudes then can we fling along with the listless, insufficient wreaths at the stillness that was once so animated and wired, the silence where the laughter was?... That all around us people are suffering behind masks less interesting than the one Robin Williams wore?"

ADDED: Brand is an interesting (if purple) writer. I like the verb "burble," and had just used it myself, before reading this, in a comment on an earlier post: "Hate speech. When is it cool and cute and something to burble about?"

"And you willingly become utterly socially autistic. You no longer pick up on basic human communication clues. You’re at a table with three humans, all of whom are looking at you and trying to talk to you, and you’re staring at a screen, searching for strangers in Dubai.... But you’re not very interesting anymore. You sit at a desk twelve hours a day and you have nothing to show for it except for some numbers that won’t exist or be remembered in a week. You’re leaving no evidence that you lived. There’s no proof.... And worse, you’re not doing anything interesting anymore. You’re not seeing anything, saying anything. The weird paradox is that you think you’re at the center of things, and that makes your opinions more valuable, but you yourself are becoming less vibrant. I bet you haven’t done anything offscreen in months. Have you?"

I'm guessing it's not "By the way, I thought of a good contest for your blog: What is the greatest sentence ever uttered by a human being?," which is something somebody uttered to me via email just now.

And I'm sure it's not: "I'm guessing it's not 'By the way, I thought of a good contest for your
blog: What is the greatest sentence ever uttered by a human being?,'
which is something somebody uttered to me via email just now."

A strange new phrase has appeared on the language landscape, and it's funny because it's so clearly wrong and it's so easy to understand where it came from and what it means. As Language Log says: "Presumably it's a garbled memory of 'scantily clad,' a phrase that involves two rare words often encountered together."

"Scantily clad" is one of the first language issues I addressed on this blog, back in March 2004. This was back in the days before posts had titles and before the word "listicle" existed, but the post is a listicle, and the 4th item is:

4. Kudos to Neil MacFarquhar for thinking of an adjective to precede "clad" other than "scantily." For decades, writers have searched their minds for an alternative and now, finally, a solution: "skimpily clad." (Read the article, too, to learn how "Abdel Hakim, a strapping young Saudi, kissed Kawthar, a raven-haired Tunisian beauty, and all hell broke loose." It's about reality TV in the Mideastern milieu.)

"... the title of an essay that
became a jingoistic catchphrase, 'the war to end all wars.' As
the conflict drew to a close, a more cynical view overtook that
sentiment when David Lloyd George, the British prime minister at the
time, is said to have remarked: 'This war, like the next war, is a war
to end war.'"

I’ve always believed that “scientist” describes a way of looking at the world. What differentiates a tenure-track faculty member or a senior researcher from an informed journalist or interested layperson is that academic researchers are trained to think theoretically. That is, they are trained to bring intellectual frameworks to their exploration of knowledge. They are trained to use evidence to build an argument, often calling upon one or more theoretical frameworks and testing how the evidence supports or does not support the conclusions that a particular theoretical framework would suggest....

Hence, I’ve always believed that an English professor discussing the feminist implications of a medieval manuscript is as much a scientist as the microbiologist analyzing the impact of a particular chemical agent on cell reproduction. What differentiates academic researchers from others who write on similar topics is the intellectual rigor they bring....

But does the English professor really bring "as much... intellectual rigor" as the microbiologist? And what happens when the feminist's framework makes out "intellectual rigor" as a patriarchal concept?

Sorry, I'm a law professor, and my framework is not "to use evidence to build an argument." It's to question the arguments that other people make and to ask what interest they have in making those arguments that way. Your argument is my evidence, and I am not engaged in a building project. (On those last 8 words, I more or less said what I had to say 20 years ago, in "Late Night Confessions in the Hart and Wechsler Hotel" — PDF.)

"I am at a loss as to why the show couldn’t revert to that (albeit with a roundtable discussion at the end). It would instantly win viewers from the right if that panel had right-of-center journalists in on the questioning (I have no doubt that one of the main reasons Gregory’s ratings have slumped is that he has zero credibility with right-of-center viewers."

Says Jonah Goldberg, and I guess I might agree but only because I miss Tim so damned much and I don't believe anyone can replace him. But David Gregory is sitting in Tim's seat without seriously trying to do what he did. Gregory is insipidly into his niceness. He doesn't belong there. It's painful. Can Chuck Todd get closer to the Russert ideal? Who knows?

The moment for reading that article never arrived for me, but I'm seeing Edroso's piece because Instapundit linked to Matt Welch at Reason, who quarrels with Edroso about the relative extent of Reason magazine's advocacy of gay marriage and the religion-based rights of businessfolk to discriminate against gay people.

You guys can fight amongst yourselves. I liked the aphorism, but unlike the relative number of statements in Reason about gay marriage and religion-based rights, it's hard to figure out what to count to check its truth. My sense that it's true comes from the embodied intuition and empathy that I feel is relatively lacking in libertarians.

"... by contrast, they betrayed no bias at all when asked to evaluate the faces of other men. Since you can’t inseminate another male—believe me, I’ve tried—that makes sense. The inverted pattern appeared for ladies with a childhood history of diarrhea: unlike their peers who preferred male faces with androgynous features, women who’d spent a worrisome amount of time on the toilet as little girls now liked their men, or at least their men’s faces, as manly as possible. Similarly, they showed no particular bias when it came to what makes a woman’s face attractive."

UPDATE: Okay, next morning: How did you all sleep? Foot out? Toe out? Well? Badly? I tried foot out, then retreated. Slept just fine, even with 4 windows open, blinds shut, and wind making the blinds knock against the sills all night.

"The chances that you will kill or injure yourself or someone you know are far greater than that you will shoot a 'bad guy.' According to the Brady Campaign, a gun in the home is 22 times more likely to kill or injure a family member in a domestic argument, accident or suicide than it is to be used to stop an intruder. Wanting to carry a concealed weapon indicates a level of paranoia or poor judgment that is unfortunate in a private citizen, but in my view, absolutely disqualifying in a person who wants to be Wisconsin's top law enforcement official."

From a column by Madison's former Mayor Dave Cieslewicz, denouncing Jefferson County District Attorney Susan Happ, a candidate for for Wisconsin attorney general in tomorrow's Democratic Party primary, because she applied for a concealed carry permit.

I got really excited when I found out there was a sequel coming out for the really little ones: "Goldilocks and the Three Open Carry Bears"

SPOILER ALERT: This does not end well for the blonde moocher who commits a Breaking and Entering.

AND: Here's the kind of illustration I was looking for:

Of course, in today's America, it's going to be a young female hitting a guy with a book. That's from "Buffy Season 8" which means close to nothing to me:

Roden hands her the book he was holding a couple of issues back which has the Twilight symbol on, he tells Faith that he has been promised to be protected from the coming “purge” if he gets rid of Buffy and the book will tell them how. She looks at the book and smiles, “thanks” she tells him, then hits him round the face with the book, "but I never was much of a reader."

"He then 'bared his chest to Mr. Eastman and asked him to look at the hair and say whether it was false'... Next, he 'persuaded Mr. Eastman to bare his chest and commented on its comparatively hairless condition.'... Hemingway was simply very pissed off about a manhood-challenging review that Eastman had written for The New Republic four years earlier. Writing about Death in the Afternoon — a nonfiction account of the bullfighting traditions of Spain — Eastman repeatedly jabs at Hemingway, saying 'the only simple thing' about the book is Hemingway himself, and alleging that his literary style is the equivalent 'of wearing false hair on the chest.'"

Nice picture at the link of Hemingway sucking in his gut and looking in the mirror at his bare torso... bear torso.

No one speaks of hairy chests as the mark of manhood anymore. I watch baseball games and mute that commercial for a nose-hair trimmer that the male model uses not only in his nose and on his ears and at his nape but also on his chest. A dinky battery-powered hair trimmer on his chest.

And of course, no one admires masculinistic writers who stride into the offices of publishers and slap critics in the face with books. I doubt if it was ever admirably manly to behave like that. The verb "slap" gives it away. Well, at least he strode. He didn't slink or sidle, which is, perhaps, how today's male author would approach a publisher.

It is pathetic, yet at the same time encouraging, to find as prominent an old communist as Max Eastman rediscovering this truth:

“It seems obvious to me now — though I have been slow, I must say, in coming to the conclusion — that the institution of private property is one of the main things that have given man that limited amount of free-and-equalness that Marx hoped to render infinite by abolishing this institution. Strangely enough Marx was the first to see this. He is the one who informed us, looking backwards, that the evolution of private capitalism with its free market had been a precondition for the evolution of all our democratic freedoms. It never occurred to him, looking forward, that if this was so, these other freedoms might disappear with the abolition of the free market.” [Max Eastman, “Socialism Doesn’t Jibe with Human Nature,” Reader’s Digest, July, 1941, p. 39.]

Slow. Maybe he needed a good slap in the head with a book. Please, no violence. Slap somebody in the head with a book today only metaphorically. And — late clue to Hemingway — "wearing false hair on the chest" was a metaphor. I hear the ghost of Hemingway — metaphorical ghost — saying "Fuck metaphor!" — "fuck" being, of course, another metaphor. Man and metaphor. It's a tricky business.

ADDED: That reference to Reader's Digest (where Eastman published his "Doesn't Jibe" piece) in the context of hitting somebody with a book got me thinking about Bob Dylan's "Motorpsycho Nightmare":

Well, he threw a Reader’s Digest
At my head and I did run
I did a somersault
As I seen him get his gun...

It's the old farmer who tries to hit Bob with the Reader's Digest and who (like the King of America) threatens him with a gun, and — resonantly enough — what enrages the old farmer is Bob's statement "I like Fidel Castro and his beard." Now, that doesn't mean Bob Dylan is a communist. Bob just needed to come up with something to say that would strike the farmer as "very weird" because he wanted to get thrown out. We all know Bob Dylan is right wing.

I think of an American city in flames because of the terrorist ability to operate in Syria and Iraq... a direct threat to the United States... the threat we face from being attacked from Syria, now Iraq... these people... attacking the homeland?

They have expressed a desire to do so.... protect the American homeland.... an existential threat to the homeland.... we're threatened. T

he homeland is threatened by the presence of ISIL in Iraq and Syria.... the threats we face... protecting the homeland... a direct threat to our homeland... we're about to be attacked in a serious way because of the threat emanating from Syria and Iraq... It is about our homeland.

And if we get attacked because he has no strategy to protect us, then he will have committed a blunder for the ages....

... there are more terrorist organizations with more safe havens, with more money, with more weapons, and more capabilities to attack the homeland than there was before 9/11. Mr. President, if you don't adjust your strategy, these people are coming here....

But isn't that the point of drawing a line — so it won't be crossed? You have to portray the crossing as a dramatic and momentous step or the drawing of a line is not a deterrent. That's why that line-drawing Obama did over Syria was bad: The line was crossed and nothing happened. And that's why it works for the NYT editors (at the first link) to encourage Obama to cross the line:

His power to conduct immigration policy is vast. Congress has given the president broad flexibility and discretion to enforce immigration law. It has also given him the resources to deport about 350,000 to 400,000 people a year, as Mr. Obama has done, relentlessly. It could have given him billions more to deport everyone, but it has not.

For Mr. Obama to use the tools at hand to focus on high-priority targets — felons, violent criminals, public-safety and national-security threats — and to let many others alone would be a rational and entirely lawful exercise of discretion....

The message (from the NYT) is: Go ahead and cross that line and you'll see. It will be just fine.

I've seen the video and think Ward is responsible for his fate. How can we interpret a flinch of Stewart's car as Stewart murderously aiming at Ward when Ward was crazily moving about? Maybe in super-slow motion there is insight into Stewart's head....

"'Good morning little schoolgirl,' it goes, 'can I go home with you? Tell your mama and your daddy, that I’m a little schoolboy too." Regardless of the era in which it was made, it’s hard to view the song’s lyrics as anything other than flesh-crawlingly creepy, and not just because it was covered by the Grateful Dead and the thought of Jerry Garcia dressed incognito as a schoolboy truly is the stuff of nightmares."

“It was this magical moment … this liberation movement, a time of sharing that was very special,” with “a lot of trust going around,” says Carolyn “Mountain Girl” Garcia, who had a baby with Ken Kesey, the man who helped kick off that season, and who then married Jerry Garcia, the man who epitomized its fruition. “The Summer of Love became the template: the Arab Spring is related to the Summer of Love; Occupy Wall Street is related to the Summer of Love,” says Joe McDonald, the creator and lead singer of Country Joe and the Fish and a boyfriend of one of that summer’s two queens, Janis Joplin. “And it became the new status quo,” he continues. “The Aquarian Age! They all want sex. They all want to have fun. Everyone wants hope. We opened the door, and everybody went through it, and everything changed after that. Sir Edward Cook, the biographer of Florence Nightingale, said that when the success of an idea of past generations is ingrained in the public and taken for granted the source is forgotten.”

Hope and change. Who knew Country Joe was such an intellectual? It's so strange what turns up when you go searching. Now, dress carefully, ladies.

The propriety of this word seems more doubtful if it be borne in mind that landscape seems to run parallel with German landschaft, the primary meaning of which is the circuit of a state, and a secondary one the impression created by nature within such circuit or region on the mind (and, of course, eye) of a spectator, and then its scientific representation by the pencil or brush. Now, it need hardly be said that -schaft has no immediate connection with the root -scep, to see, but with shaffen, to make, and corresponds with our -ship, as in freundschaft, friendship. But this -ship was an Anglo-Saxon or First English -scipe, and belongs to the verbs scapan, sceapan, or scyppan, to form or shape. Our landscape, too, was often written landskip, but whether this is the older form or not I have no materials to prove. It may be a descendant or the above-mentioned scyppan or scipan. Landscipe appears in Bosworth, but not sœscipe, as the sea was probably never regarded as possessing natural lines and boundaries. Landscape is, therefore, not properly a region which the eye beholds or contemplates as a view; and if seascape be regarded as a water view, it is suggestive of a false etymology.

U.S. officials attribute the Islamic State’s rapid emergence to factors both psychological and tactical. Its core group of fighters honed their skills against the armies of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and the United States when it occupied Iraq. The group has used raids and ransoms to stockpile weapons and cash. And its merciless reputation triggered rampant defections among Sunni members of Iraq’s security forces already disenchanted with the Shiite-led government in Baghdad.

No one ever said it better than Osama bin Laden: "When people see a strong horse and a weak horse, by nature they will like the strong horse."

The humorist, John Kenney, has 8 examples of "it" not being said "better," e.g.:

Let’s say you see a kitten. Fine, make it two kittens. Let’s say you see two kittens. One’s nimble and fast and cute. The other one is dead. My experience is that people—and by people I mean children—by nature go for the live kitten. They see strength in the live kitten. Also, who wants a dead kitten?

When people see a frightening news story and a silly humor piece, by nature, they will not laugh at the humor piece.